For the women’s indoor track and field team, history repeated itself on Saturday — sort of.

For the second year in a row, the Bulldogs lost the Harvard-Yale-Princeton meet by a single point. The only thing that changed was the winner. In Cambridge the Bulldogs fell to the Tigers 60-59, but finished solidly ahead of a Crimson team that scored 40 points. The score was nearly identical to the 2003 meet when Harvard edged the Bulldogs 61-60 and Princeton came in third with 38 points.

“It’s disappointing particularly since on Friday we had a team conversation about the importance of every point,” Yale head coach Mark Young ’68 said. “[But] there were a lot of kids who didn’t factor in the scoring who had their best performances of the year.”

In the highlight of the meet, Molly Lederman ’06 broke her own school record in the pole vault. Lederman won the event and set her college best by clearing a height of 3.97 meters, about 13 feet and a quarter-inch. She is the first Ivy League woman to break the 13-foot barrier, and her performance met the provisional qualifying standard for the NCAA Championships.

“I was really excited to jump 13 feet on Saturday,” Lederman said. “I had cleared 13 feet in high school but not yet in college. It was both reassuring and motivating to realize that all of the hard work is paying off.”

Lederman is a copy staffer for the Yale Daily News.

In the team competition, the Bulldogs received more than a quarter of their points from Joslyn Woodard ’06, who won the 60-meter dash, the 200-meter dash, and the long jump.

“Winning the three events at this meet was important because last year I came in fourth in the long jump, an event I should have won,” Woodard said. “If I had then, we would have won the meet. This year I wanted to make sure that didn’t happen.”

The Bulldogs scored another large portion of their points in the 800-meter run, an event which they have dominated this season. Vanessa Mazandi ’05 won once again, in a personal record time of 2:10.69, barely beating Rebecca Dickens ’04, who ran a 2:10.84, setting a season best, Young said. Katie Greene ’06 notched a personal record of 2:12.90, good for third place.

A similar swarm of Elis came in the 400-meter dash. Princeton’s Hasina Outtz won the race, but the Bulldogs swept the next three places as Katie Dlesk ’07, Jessica Pall ’07 and Caroline Zier ’06 finished within a second of each other.

Captain Lisa Wygant ’04, who lost the high jump last week on misses, won this time, again clearing a height of 1.70 meters.

The Elis were hurt by Princeton’s success in the distance events. The Tigers took places one through three in the mile and one through four in the 3000-meter run, a race in which the top three runners ran times under the NCAA provisional qualifying standard.

The Bulldogs continue to suffer from injuries. Dionna Thomas ’06, Yale’s best triple jumper, missed the meet with a stress fracture. Rebecca Hunter ’04, who was second in the 1500 at outdoor the Heptagonal Championships last year, is returning from Achilles’ tendonitis.

The meet does not count toward the Ivy Championship, which is decided by one meet, and the Bulldogs believe they are better than they showed on Saturday.

“We know that many were injured and that we are a better team, but when you look at the results we still lost,” Woodard said. “However, we have the chance to prove to them in two weeks that we are in fact much better.”

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